Sometimes a side project starts in a comment thread.
While working at Protocol Labs on Slate an open-source file storage network built on top of IPFS and Filecoin, something like Small Victories: a simple way to turn a folder of files into a published website, except entirely on decentralized storage.
That's more or less how this one began.
The core idea was straightforward: Slate was piloting Protocol Labs' decentralized storage infrastructure at a moment when Filecoin was approaching mainnet launch and the web3 storage primitive was genuinely new and underexplored. If you could store files on IPFS through Slate, the natural next question was whether you could also publish from there — building and hosting a lightweight website without touching a traditional server or CDN at all.
I came on as the designer and developer for the concept, working through what that experience could feel like. Small Victories was the clearest reference point: it treated your Dropbox folder as a CMS and generated a site from whatever you put in it, with a small set of opinionated templates. The appeal was the near-zero setup no deploy pipeline, no config files, just files in a folder becoming a website. The question we were exploring was whether Slate's storage layer could do the same thing, with the added property that your site would live on a distributed network rather than a single host.
The template discussion in the comments got specific quickly a feed layout like the Polaroids template, a clean static HTML option, something in the spirit of the old Museum theme. The building blocks were there: Slate already had a solid file upload and organization layer, a growing API, and an open-source codebase that made it practical to build on top of.
The project didn't ship in its original form Slate's roadmap evolved, and the website publishing layer stayed in the concept phase while the team focused on the core storage experience. But the question it was asking what does publishing look like when storage is decentralized? — felt genuinely open, and still does. The infrastructure for this kind of thing is more mature now than it was when we were sketching it out, and I expect it's a space worth returning to.